Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Magritte with “Femme-Bouteille,” his oil painting of a nude on a glass bottle, in 1955

Rene Magritte is a favorite of yours truly as wit and playfulness permeate his work complete with whimsical titles such as Ceci'n'est pas un pipe or The Treachery of Images. :)

When René Magritte was a little boy growing up in Belgium in the early 1900s, he had a friend called Raymond who lived a few doors down. Raymond recalls going over to play at the Magrittes’ house, where René’s father Léopold kept a room full of “white metal containers of Cocoline”—a new, coconut oil-based form of margarine which he sold for work—“and advertising posters, too.” Raymond remembers the Cocoline well, he once said, “because René and I played with it, climbed on it, made tunnels through it, and we were coated, coated in it, it was like lard,” and he got in big trouble. 

This image, of two little boys absolutely spackled with goo, appears on page 11 of Alex Danchev’s new biography, Magritte: A Life, and would not leave my mind until I had turned the final one. It seems to contain everything about the Surrealist painter’s life and work, in miniature. For one thing, it wouldn’t have happened without the extreme laxity of René’s father: Magritte and his brothers were hellraisers, Danchev explains, who showed all the local kids pornography, frequently yelled “Fire!,” and were rumored to have killed a donkey. And yet he grew up into a painter whose ideas are precise and elegant, and a man who wore bowler hats every day and lived a punctilious and bourgeois life in a Brussels suburb.

For all the grown-upness of Magritte’s artworks, with their highbrow symbols and bowler hat formality, they have a naughtiness about them, and Magritte had a naughtiness about himself, Danchev suggests, a quality that uses a child’s respect for nonsense to break apart the ordinary function of symbols and words. Underneath the apparent respectability of his paintings, so smooth in their rendering of elegant references to semiotics and psychology, is a bad child, uncatchable and still uncaught, writhing with glee in the surplus fat of the twentieth century.

It seems like a contradiction in terms, but isn’t. The connections that animated Magritte’s freakish imagination are there, in the graphic language of the Cocoline containers and posters, which predict his graphic design practice, Studio Dongo, and the Cocoline itself—a substitute for a substitute, neither solid nor liquid—presages Magritte’s love of making the ordinary grotesque. But most of all, it’s the fact of play.

Totally agree. :)